Home > Why Proactive Chat is Superior to Site Monitoring

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(Last Updated On: August 5, 2021)

About This Article

The purpose of this article is to provide a comprehensive overview of why Proactive Chat is better than Site Monitoring.

We occasionally hear requests for this feature, “Site Monitoring,” which allows you to view all of your website visitors in real time for the purpose of manually extending chat invitations one by one.

We decided that the time had come to document our official stance on the matter.

It is not surprising that Site Monitoring seems attractive at first glance, but if you give us a moment of your time, we think you’ll see how and why SnapEngage’s “Proactive Chat” feature trumps the supposed advantages of Site Monitoring by a wide margin.


The Highlights

Proactive Chat is automated

  • Not a moment of your team’s time is wasted.
  • The system doesn’t get tired of inviting (and doesn’t feel dejected when people ignore it).
  • The system will continue extending invites as long as an Agent is online.

Proactive Chat is configured by the Admin:

  • The administrators retains control of first-contact messaging.
  • Different messages can be configured for different situations, and different pages.
  • Our Proactive Rule configuration system is robust, and highly customizable

No more worrying about missed opportunities

  • The Proactive system will send invites to far more people than a manually-triggered system.
  • You won’t miss that one promising lead because your Agents didn’t send an invite.

Most visitors will simply not respond

  • Even a 20% success rate on chat invites would be quite high.
  • With Proactive, you don’t need to waste your time on people who don’t want to talk.

A far more effective use of agent time

  • Your Agents can focus all of their attention on those visitors who want to talk.
  • No time wasted on visitors who will simply never engage with you via chat.

A Closer Look

Let’s look at some example numbers

  • Let’s say your proactive chat sends automated chat invites to 10,000 visitors in one month.

The above has cost you literally $0.00 in labor cost. You have not wasted one second of your Agents’ work day with manual chat invites. It is important to note at this point: most visitors will not want to chat with you, this is a simple reality of the way people browse the internet.

  • Let’s make an (optimistic) estimate that 20% of your visitors respond to a Proactive chat invite.

In this case, you will receive 2,000 chats from Proactive Invitations that month. (Which is 2,000 more customers than you were able to chat with before!) But the more important metric to consider in terms of “Proactive Chat vs. Manual Invites” is this one: There were around 8,000 chat invites which were completely ignored by your visitors.

As stated, a 20% success rate for Proactive Invitations is pretty optimistic, but so long as that 80/20 split isn’t costing you an extra dime, you’re literally saving money — consider the following:

If your chat team were manually extending chat invites and poring over a list of website visitors, 80% of that work would be a loss, because 80% of those invites would go completely ignored.

To expand on that point: The time and attention that your Agents would otherwise be wasting on mostly-ignored manual chat invites can instead be spent on much more productive tasks, like chatting with those visitors who have clearly expressed an interest in chatting!

  • You’re not going to convince someone who doesn’t want to chat that they should chat with you.
  • Your team’s time is much better spent engaging with those customers who do want to chat.

And the best way to filter the former from the latter is to automate the process.

SnapEngage provides robust tools for intelligently (as well as automatically) attempting to engage your website visitor

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Published December 17, 2013